Branch Cut for Mozilla Firebird 0.8

Wednesday December 17th, 2003

A branch has been created for the forthcoming release of Mozilla Firebird 0.8. The branch will allow Firebird 0.8 work to continue without the uncertainty caused by the daily changes made to the main Mozilla development trunk (currently frozen for Mozilla 1.6). However, critical trunk fixes will be merged into the new Firebird 0.8 branch.

If you read the bug report, it's not nearly so bad as it sounds. In 99% of cases the mime type is used as it should be. In the specific case that the connection is HTTP (i.e. the patch doen't affect ftp or anything else), the content type is text/plain, and there is no character encoding set (or there is the Apache 2 default chracter encoding set) then Mozilla will attempt to determine the content type - initially by looking for the presence of particular features such as ascii control codes then (Windows only) looking at the file name extension. This situation is not substantially worse than before, since content without a proper character set header has always been run though a sniffer to try and determine the encoding being used - the standards dictate in this case that it should be displayed as US-ACSII instead.

This differs substanitially from the current behavior of IE in that there are very few situations in which content served from a correctly set up server will be handled incorrectly. As far as I can tell, in order to trigger the misintepretation of a legitamate text/plain document, you'd need to meet the follwoing criterion: No specified encoding (i.e. rely on the US-ASCII default) or ISO-8859-1 encoding, no leading byte order mark (I guess a legitimate ASCII document won't have a BOM since they're 1 byte/character - this check prevents UTF-16 from being detected as binary), includes ASCII control characters in the range 0-8, 13-26 or 28-31.

1) Determine whether there is any reasonable chance that the data is text/plain after all
2) If not, kick the data out to the external helper app handler and have it use the extension
(on ALL OSes) or treat it as application/octet-stream.

In particular, text/plain content with a .html extension will NOT render in the browser content area with this patch (which is what would happen if the patch did what you claim it does)....

Is this noted somewhere on the web because this will be quite a wake up call for those incorrect MIME types out there?

Also I'm wondering what's next for IE. Just out of curiousity because I don't use it. Some were saying IE 6 sp2 but now I hear as you say IE 6.05 for XP in its sp2. So the other OS's (2000/98/ME) are up the creek or will they get an sp2 for IE 6?

I haven't seen details of exactly what IE6 in XP SP2 is going to do, but it wasn't clear that they're going to go the whole way to doing what Mozilla does.

As jgraham explains, this non-standard behaviour is only going to happen in a limited set of circumstances. Those circumstances are ones which only happen if the server is not following the standards, which was an important factor in considering this change. IE's behaviour causes wrong things to happen when the server is following standards - Mozilla's behaviour won't.

Ahh good timing, below is zdnet's coverage of the beta sp2 for XP. And it sounds like only XP users will get popup blocking for IE (v 6.05 I think). Good news for us.

"Microsoft has said it expects to have a final version of SP2 ready by mid-2004 for all Windows XP users."

I had already heard about the firewall being turned on and the messenger being turned off. But no word on the URL problem or the MIME fix. But because the final is still 6 months away they'll be in there.

It annoys me when a webserver does not have the correct MIME types set. I think it shows the ignorance of some server admins. It's not a problem to IE so they don't know a problem even exists. I had a problem with msi files on a website I maintain at work being sent with text/plain. I asked to have it fixed and now it works correctly for gecko browsers.

But I didn't notice this problem when testing because my test server happened to be setup correctly beings it's IIS.

Hopefully, someone will realize that it is stupid to have two products named Mozilla 1.0 (the suite and Firebird). Currenlty, anyone that says Mozilla 1.0 can make the assumption that it is from the suite. However, when and if Firebird is released as "Mozilla 1.0", then there will be the (new) "Mozilla 1.0 Browser" and the (old) "Mozilla 1.0 Suite Browser". I suppose you could call the new browser "Mozilla Firebird 1.0", but it was my understanding that "Firebird" was just a code name for the project until it goes 1.0, after which time it will be dropped.

I really think that Firebird should be called 2.0, and the Mozilla Suite should never exceed version 1.9, but thats just my opinion.

The Mozilla suite will continue (in the sense of an overall package that will let you install individual components) - it's SeaMonkey that won't. It will still be the Mozilla suite - just with Firebird dropped in as the browser instead of SeaMonkey. So, for example, it could be Mozilla 2.0, containing Firebird, Thunderbird, and Sunbird as available installation components. The suite (if not it's fully integrated structure) will continue.

You do realize that 90% of the work done on the suite is automatically picked up by Firebird, right? Anything that isn't completely specific to the suite's UI also goes into Thunderbird and Firebird. It's hardly "a waste", many companies that support Mozilla (both financially and merely by using their product) want the suite to continue, and Firebird and Thunderbird are still buggy enough that they shouldn't completely replace the suite. The people in charge of the project include many professional software developers and managers, do you honestly believe they're just too stupid to see things your way?

I don't know how they do it... Every Firebird release seems faster, yet with more and more and more features! I was generally pleased with Firebird 0.6.1 (remember that?), I figured that it only needed some polish but no new features. However, version 0.7 blew me away and I didn't think the developers could do it again. Boy was I wrong!

This newest version seems great! The new download manager is a nice improvement (visually, though not functionally) over the clunky sidebar. The integration of the JavaScript Console and DOM Inspector are nice additions (how about adding the Link Toolbar to completely complement Seamonkey's browsing features?), but the speed the this new beast boggles my mind! Firebird used to load under ten seconds on my machine, but this new monster takes under THREE! That's right, THREE! How the developers managed that without preloading (which Seamonkey and Internet Explorer use to "cheat" their startup times) is beyond me.

P.S. With all the work that Ben Goodger seems to be doing in Bugzilla lately, perhaps this release should be nicknamed Benbird? Good job!

P.S.2 Don't want to be a brown-noser, so I'll cancel my complement by saying that Goodger's ugly too! :-P

Mozilla gets faster with every release too. Now that I think of it, almost all open source software gets faster with every release. Why is it only the closed stuff that slows down? OK, admittedly, mozilla came from far back in the performance game, but now it matches up pretty much equally with IE, and it's still getting faster.

By the way, I have a linux box that firebird 0.7 takes about 7 seconds to start on. The first mozilla release I used as main browser on there was M18, and it took 22 seconds to start. A long way indeed. Back then it would frustrate me to no end if the browser crashed, not because I lost session, but because I had to take a coffee break while it restarted.

<i>Mozilla gets faster with every release too. Now that I think of it, almost all open source software gets faster with every release. Why is it only the closed stuff that slows down? OK, admittedly, mozilla came from far back in the performance game, but now it matches up pretty much equally with IE, and it's still getting faster.</i>

Well, you also have to take into account the fact that the original code from Netscape was in such a terrible state of affairs, even though there was alot of spitting and cursing, 2 years later we have a browser which is a lot slimmer and cleaner, oh, and more importantly much more stable than Netscape ever was. Anyone remember the constant hanging of Netscape Communicator, and this wasn't just a Windows issue, heck, try Netscape Communicator 4.79 on Solaris and you'll see what I mean. I was a bad joke and thank goodness they opensource community did something about it.

<i>By the way, I have a linux box that firebird 0.7 takes about 7 seconds to start on. The first mozilla release I used as main browser on there was M18, and it took 22 seconds to start. A long way indeed. Back then it would frustrate me to no end if the browser crashed, not because I lost session, but because I had to take a coffee break while it restarted.</i>

I stopped using Netscape when the crashing became terrible. I stuck with the likes of Lynx and links, yes, CLI browsers, but atleast the blasted thing wouldn't crash. Right now I am using Firebird 0.7.1 on MacOS 10.3.2 and put it this way, "I'm excited!". IMHO, the sooner they kill of the suite, the better. Modularise it and allow individual downloads of each component.

Personally I think Mozilla Chat should be a seperate piece of software and should work to basically being a good clone of Mirc/XChat for all platforms.

Having separate pieces of apps does not have to be an advantage, some users, including me, prefer "all-in-one" package, like new Opera 7.50P1. Why? I love Firebird .7, but with Opera I have email, RSS reader, browser, contacts, transfers, notes, etc., all under one, single, opened window, just in different MDI pages, switching easily between them. If sending an email to a site I am browsing, I do not have to start another email program, the email window will open in 0.01 seconds... THis makes browsing so much faster. I would love to see an interface to Mozilla Suite that makes this possible. Having separate apps means you need much more time to do simple tasks!

For the url time out try the Show Failed URL extension. You'll need to enable XUL error pages under the - browser.xul.error_pages.enabled - preference. I used the Preferential Extension to do this or goto about:config.

I am new to this so please bear with me if this is the wrong place to post this question.

I have just started using the mozilla browser on my linux box at work but it seems there are problems getting it to show simple text files that do not end with a .txt extension. For example some of these text files end with .TAF or .TTF and when I clink on the corresponding link I get the option to use a program to open or save it to disk as the file is of type application/octet-stream (Binary Executable)
which it obviously is not.

So when I go to the preferences to try and associate the file type with an application I find that mozilla defaults the file type specified in the helper application setting to lower case. Which in turn means that I no longer get prompted to either download or use a file to open it, I get simlpe get a message that explians there is a problem with the page. So some sort of association has worked but not the right one.

I have looked at Ben Goodger's article listed at the top of the page but this is only for windoze, is there a similar thing for linux ??

I am new to this so please bear with me if this is the wrong place to post this question.

I have just started using the mozilla browser on my linux box at work but it seems there are problems getting it to show simple text files that do not end with a .txt extension. For example some of these text files end with .TAF or .TTF and when I clink on the corresponding link I get the option to use a program to open or save it to disk as the file is of type application/octet-stream (Binary Executable)
which it obviously is not.

So when I go to the preferences to try and associate the file type with an application I find that mozilla defaults the file type specified in the helper application setting to lower case. Which in turn means that I no longer get prompted to either download or use a file to open it, I get simlpe get a message that explians there is a problem with the page. So some sort of association has worked but not the right one.

I have looked at Ben Goodger's article listed at the top of the page but this is only for windoze, is there a similar thing for linux ??

I am new to this so please bear with me if this is the wrong place to post this question.

I have just started using the mozilla browser on my linux box at work but it seems there are problems getting it to show simple text files that do not end with a .txt extension. For example some of these text files end with .TAF or .TTF and when I clink on the corresponding link I get the option to use a program to open or save it to disk as the file is of type application/octet-stream (Binary Executable)
which it obviously is not.

So when I go to the preferences to try and associate the file type with an application I find that mozilla defaults the file type specified in the helper application setting to lower case. Which in turn means that I no longer get prompted to either download or use a file to open it, I get simlpe get a message that explians there is a problem with the page. So some sort of association has worked but not the right one.

I have looked at Ben Goodger's article listed at the top of the page but this is only for windoze, is there a similar thing for linux ??

I am new to this so please bear with me if this is the wrong place to post this question.

I have just started using the mozilla browser on my linux box at work but it seems there are problems getting it to show simple text files that do not end with a .txt extension. For example some of these text files end with .TAF or .TTF and when I clink on the corresponding link I get the option to use a program to open or save it to disk as the file is of type application/octet-stream (Binary Executable)
which it obviously is not.

So when I go to the preferences to try and associate the file type with an application I find that mozilla defaults the file type specified in the helper application setting to lower case. Which in turn means that I no longer get prompted to either download or use a file to open it, I get simlpe get a message that explians there is a problem with the page. So some sort of association has worked but not the right one.

I have looked at Ben Goodger's article listed at the top of the page but this is only for windoze, is there a similar thing for linux ??